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"Mathematica not responding message" on Ubuntu

Under Linux, the Mathematica front end does not handle window manager messages correctly. This misbehavior is present for a long time now and it is still not fixed in 10.3. In Mathematica version 8, rotating a 3d graphics for longer than some second resulted in a graying out of the complete front end, indicating that Mathematica has become unresponsive. This looked like that:

v8 bug1 v8 bug2

In Mathematica version 10.3 and Ubuntu with GNOME Shell as desktop, you cannot move a slider for more than some seconds because than, a warning message appears saying that Mathematica is not responding and asking if you want to kill it. This looks like like that

v10.3 bug

The most annoying thing is that when you press Esc to make the dialog disappear, then Mathematica is killed and all unsaved work is lost. After accidentally killing my sessions several times and since I have to take care to move sliders only for one or two seconds, I'm super annoyed by this. Especially, since it can only fixed for GNOME Shell by patching and recompiling Mutter.

This specific bug was already described here, here, here, and here. One of the the red-hat dev-people wrote about it the following:

The window is apparently responding to your mouse clicks, but it isn't responding to NETWMPING messages (the timeout is 5 seconds.) This is a Mathematica bug. Honestly, we're not going to do this [fix it in mutter] - if apps advertise NETWMPING in their WM_PROTOCOLS they need to live up to the contract of responding to it in a timely fashion.

If you want to reproduce the bug, just open a fresh Mathematica and type something like a=3. Now, just click on the = sign and hold the mouse button for more than 5 seconds.

Question: Is there a way to prevent this behavior in GNOME Shell? If not, is there a preferred Linux distribution that should be used for Mathematica?

POSTED BY: Patrick Scheibe
8 Replies

Have you tried for instance this solution?

POSTED BY: Patrick Scheibe
Posted 5 years ago

Just tried this and no, it did not work :/

POSTED BY: Paula V.
Posted 5 years ago

Any fixes to this bug already? It's been 3 years and I'm still experiencing exactly the same issue on Ubuntu 18.04 running Mathematica 10.4.1

POSTED BY: Paula V.

Just a comment: It really has nothing to do with the specific Linux distribution you are using. It's the desktop environment that is important. Since I had more such glitches that I found increasingly annoying taking into account that I was using a standard Ubuntu which is surely one of the most used distributions these days, I finally decided to make a hard decision last year.

For my new system, I'm using now XUbuntu which comes with Xfce, a very very lightweight desktop environment. In preparation, I had tested several other Ubuntu versions like LUbuntu, KUbuntu, etc. As it turned out, when you have a version that doesn't show a particular bug, it sometimes show a different bug in the front-end (I remember eg that LUbuntu had a completely screwed splash screen).

I'm currently doing fine with XUbuntu, although you have to clearly say that Xfce is lightweight and cannot be compared with a GPU supported Gnome environment. The only issue with Mathematica on Xfce is that rarely, copy and paste doesn't work and you have to try it a second time.

POSTED BY: Patrick Scheibe

I concur. I'm currently seeing this problem on Red Hat EL 7.2 with Mathematica 10.3.1, but it has existed through several versions of Mma and RHEL. Please fix!

POSTED BY: Michael Prange
Posted 8 years ago

This problem still exists with Mathematica 10.4 on Gnome 3.18.

POSTED BY: M R

Your post was fixed. Thanks for reporting. You can always use Feedback button on the right side of any Wolfram Community page.

POSTED BY: Moderation Team

I'm not sure why the text I posted does not appear. When I click on "Edit", I see all the things I have written, but the final post is empty. The input code can be found here and you can

POSTED BY: Patrick Scheibe
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